Thursday, August 24, 2006

In December of 1922, Ernest was in Lausanne for The Star covering the peace conference trying to settle a dispute between Greece and Turkey.

He was trying to get Hadley to come down. She didn't want to fly through the mountains in the winter so she took the train from the Gare de Lyon station.She decided to take all of Ernest's manuscripts except for "Up in Michigan" which was in a drawer somewhere in the apartment, and "My Old Man" which was in the mail to a publisher. She thought this would be a wonderful surprise for Ermest - she wanted to break up the tedium that he usually felt at conferences.

She grabbed all of his fiction and poetry that she could find. She hoped to please him by bringing his manuscripts so he could have something to work on besides his journalism. A porter carried her bags to the train from the taxi and the bag with the manuscripts was stolen in that brief space of time. All of Ernest's work - including the carbons; his only copies - were lost. He had to start all over again from memory. Scholars still hope that the suitcase will be found with the original manuscripts intact.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

The top photo is a passport photo for John Dos Passos. Then a photo portrait from the 1920s.In the winter photo from Vorarlberg, March, 1926, left to right: Frau Lent, Ernest Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Gerald Murphy.The bottom photo is a book jacket of "Three Soldiers," a book published in 1921 about the First World War.John Dos Passos was another American of "The Lost Generation." He was an ambulance driver in Italy like Hemingway in World War I. They actually met and chatted in the Piave campaign, but they didn't keep in touch. He spent time in Paris where he met Hemingway again and the other American expat writers and artists. He was always travelling, looking for adventurous situations to observe and write about. He is believed to be "the pilot fish" that hemingway mentions in "A Moveable Feast." The person that showed up before "the rich" came & spoiled a relatively unknown place. Dos Passos was a pilot fish for the Murphys.He is said to have travelled more to seek out adventure in conflicts and in social situations than even Hemingway. He wrote 42 books and was quite a painter with over 400 works of art to his credit.